Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Having farmed in a small Montana town his whole life, sixty-three-year-old Oien could sympathize with Casey’s anxiety about planting something so different from what his neighbors were growing. Amber waves of grain were like a religion in this part of the West. Any other plant life was labeled a weed and taken as a sign of some deep character flaw, some profound failure. Here in central Montana, the measure of a man was in plain sight, and it was calculated in bushels per acre. The trouble with all that heroic grain, however, was that it was taking a lot of nutrients and water out of the soil, without giving anything back. Sometimes farmers got away with this rather amazing faith in their land’s limitless productivity, and if wheat prices happened to be up, they could even turn a handsome profit. But not in a drought year. Mother Nature was calling foul.

  The last time drought had struck the grain belt—in the 1980s—Oien had been a thirtysomething like Casey, worried about how to save his family farm in the face of bad weather and corporate consolidation in the food system. Most people thought the solution was bigger farms, bigger machinery, and more chemicals. That’s what Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz had told farmers like Oien’s parents. Get big or get out. Modernize or perish. Watching as their community shrank and their friends died of cancer after too many years manning a spray rig, Orville and Gudrun Oien had begged their son to follow Butz’s advice—the “get out” part. Armed with a college degree, Dave could’ve landed a good job in Seattle or Chicago. But he was too stubborn. He stayed put. He stayed small. And he planted lentils.

  When Oien seeded the first organic lentil in his county, it was a radical act. For the past two generations, American farmers like him have had one job: grow more grain. In Iowa and Nebraska, that’s corn. On the northern plains, farms specialize in either wheat or barley. All other life-forms stand aside so that farmers can grow one plant, year after year, aiming to fill the bin each August. Every twelve months, bursting seed heads pack the full sum of the farmer’s human effort, modern technology, and natural endowments into the original form of stored wealth: grain.

  Lentils do exactly the opposite. Instead of mining the soil for nutrients to fuel an impressive harvest, this Robin Hood of the dryland prairie gathers the abundant fertility of the aboveground world—of the air, in fact—and shares it freely beneath the earth’s surface. Inside the plant’s nodules, bacteria surreptitiously convert atmospheric nitrogen into a community nutrient supply. If wheat is the symbol of rugged individualism, then lentils embody that other agrarian hallmark too often overlooked in the Western mythos: community.

  A cheap, healthy source of protein, lentils have been feeding the world since biblical times. They are drought resilient and don’t need irrigation. They are also legumes, which means they can convert atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer. This makes lentils an ideal crop to raise in rotation—since plants grown in the same field the next year can benefit from the boost of leftover fertility. In fact, if farmers grow them as part of a diverse sequence of crops that keep weed pressure at bay, they don’t need to use chemicals at all. The plants themselves take care of the functions formerly performed by expensive industrial inputs—just like natural plant communities do in the wilderness.

  To young David Oien, it had all seemed so obvious. If family farm agriculture was going to survive, if people were going to take care of the planet and still produce sufficient food, if there was still some sense to be made out of life in rural America—surely this was the way to do it. But to everyone else in his county, particularly Oien’s banker, lentils were anything but obvious. How would he sell them? How would he harvest them? And for that matter, how did he even know they would grow? No one had done this here before, and the agricultural experts at Montana State University were skeptical. Bombarded with dozens of such questions—and dirty looks from his weed-phobic neighbors—Oien realized he was trying to change something much bigger than his parents’ 280-acre homestead. He could save his farm, but not alone. To stand up against the entrenched power of the food system’s 1 percent, he would need to convince hundreds of other farmers to take the biggest risk of their lives.

  A world away from the hippie communes of California and the organic food co-ops of liberal cities, Oien and his nonprofit allies started their sustainable agriculture movement modestly. They set up a series of field trials on their farms, to prove that lentils could grow on the dry northern plains. They built a network of more than 120 Farm Improvement Clubs, to learn how to do it better. Eventually, they crowd-funded a processing plant, passed legislation to make organic certification legal in Montana, and jerry-rigged equipment to clean, plant, and harvest their tiny seeds. But as Oien’s wife reminded him, the heady lentil revolutionaries still had to pay their bills. Having built an underground, they needed to set up a front operation.

  In 1987, Oien and three of his friends formed a company, Timeless Seeds, to process and market their organic legumes. They started small, peddling fifty-pound bags to whatever farmer friends happened by the Oiens’ Quonset hut. Then, in 1994, they diversified into the food market, with a French Green lentil contract for Trader Joe’s. Although short-lived, the Trader Joe’s contract spurred Dave and his friends to purchase a bona fide processing facility, and within five years, they’d rolled out a full retail line and started working with gourmet restaurants. By 2012, Timeless Seeds had matured into a million-dollar business, and one of its growers was a US senator.

  But now that drought had struck again, Timeless and its farmers faced a moment of truth. Oien had won over foodies in the Bay Area and New York with the story of his resilient crop, which was now being touted by renowned chefs. He’d even convinced some die-hard locavores that Montana lentils were a greener choice than conventionally fertilized local produce, given the environmental impacts and shocking greenhouse gas footprint of synthetic nitrogen. It all made sense in theory. Now that theory was about to be tested.

  Dismounting from their perch on Casey Bailey’s hay wagon, his fellow growers inspected the young man’s rapidly drying French Green lentils. Fingering the crackly seedpods, the methodical farmers debated when Casey should pick them up with his combine. Too soon, and he would have a premature crop. But too late, and his lentils would dry up and fall off the stalk—or succumb to the ever-present possibility of a hailstorm. Picturing their own lentils baking in the blistering sun, the stoic farmers sounded the faintest notes of apprehension. They all had several thousand dollars’ worth of crops sitting in their parched fields, and they were still a couple of weeks away from squirreling them safely away in their bins. They knew lentils were supposed to be relatively drought resilient, but they couldn’t help worrying. Would they make it to harvest?

  1

  HOMECOMING

  Overshadowed by the peaks of Glacier National Park, which tower Alps-like on its western horizon, the small farming town of Conrad, Montana, doesn’t particularly stand out. Much the opposite, in fact. It’s almost as if this modest community on central Montana’s dryland plains wants you to know it’s not jealous of its ostentatious neighbor. Instead of competing with Glacier’s charismatic wilderness, Conrad presents itself as primly unremarkable. Numbered streets hem manicured lawns and uniform rows of wheat and barley into a neat grid, keeping each creature in its place.

  Ever since the first homesteaders arrived in Conrad at the dawn of the twentieth century, this tight-knit community on the Rocky Mountain Front has tenaciously maintained the boundary between wilderness and civilization. The mountains of Glacier National Park mark the wild side, where people incur hefty fines for so much as moving a single stone. The windswept agricultural prairie is the controlled side. When people here speak of well-managed farms as “clean,” you have the sense that they would be much happier if they could raise wheat in brushed aluminum or stainless steel—anything but the indiscriminately fecund medium of soil.

  Engaged in perennial battle with weeds and pests, Conrad’s farmers find themselves stationed at the great divide, not just betwee
n the two halves of North America, but between nature and agriculture. Traditionally, that divide has been cast as a bitter conflict, a zero-sum game that pits pristine wilderness against rural livelihoods. Academics refer to this great divide as the “land-sparing” strategy: Places like Glacier are set aside to spare land for nature, supposedly taking people entirely out of the ecological equation. Meanwhile, in places like Conrad, farmers attempt near-total control over uniform fields of grain in order to “feed the world,” supposedly taking nature completely out of the equation. Across most of middle America, for most of the twentieth century, the conventional wisdom was that this neat partition was the best way to grow enough food to feed humanity without destroying the environment.

  Although Conrad was never among the American heartland’s most productive communities, the land-sparing strategy seemed to be effective here. When the little farm town’s first generation of settlers arrived, during the homestead rush of 1904–18, early researchers at the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station encouraged them to plant a variety of drought-tolerant crops and further diversify their farms with livestock. But railroad baron James Hill had a different idea. In 1909, Hill hosted a Dry Farming Congress to convince farmers that it would be more efficient if they dedicated as much of their land as possible to the crop he happened to be in the business of shipping: wheat. At first, Hill’s advice seemed prudent. When farmers plowed up the native prairie and planted wheat, they were able to grow enough food to support their families and earn a good living too. True, a severe drought in 1917 devastated the crop, and 2 million acres ceased production. The Dust Bowl and the Depression sent 11,000 farmers packing and crashed half of Montana’s banks. But as modern farming developed, the homesteaders’ children regained their confidence, placing their faith in science. They learned to apply synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to increase their yields, and when the herbicide 2,4-D came along in the 1950s, it was a revelation. One pass on the spray rig, and the weeds went away. Liberated from the drudgery of the cultivating tractor, farm families could imagine taking the weekend off and heading up to the lake, or going on vacation in Glacier.

  To Conrad’s stoic, largely Protestant inhabitants, these midcentury agricultural advances seemed like the work of divine providence, a reward for their pious efforts. It became customary, when passing by a tidy, productive farm, to remark that a good family must live there. Having been blessed with 2,4-D and ammonium nitrate, postwar Conrad appeared to be teeming with such upstanding citizens. In 1950, 70 percent of all the food Montanans ate was grown in state.

  But in the early 1980s, as Conrad’s second generation of farmers prepared to hand off their homesteads to their own progeny, signs of trouble emerged. Their fields looked good, at least early in the season, but the “For Sale” signs popping up amid Conrad’s grain were proving a more serious menace than any weed. Behind every bankruptcy was the heartbreaking story of a good farmer undercut by drought or rising fertilizer costs or poor commodity prices. Since they weren’t in charge of the markets or the weather, Conrad’s farmers tried even harder to control what they could—spraying more herbicides, cultivating more acres. But instead of solving their problems, these efforts just sunk the desperate farmers further into debt. By 1983, US farm foreclosures would reach their highest levels since the Depression. Once again, 2 million acres of Montana farmland went out of production.

  Conrad’s grain farmers were experiencing the “cost-price squeeze,” one of several problems with industrial agriculture that gradually became apparent over the course of the 1980s. Farmers were paying so much for the sophisticated machinery and chemicals that made their extraordinary sixty-bushel grain possible that they couldn’t afford a dry year or a depressed commodity market—the margins were too tight. Meanwhile, the American heartland wasn’t just losing people; it was also losing topsoil, at the rate of 3 billion tons a year. Intensive industrial farming methods left soil vulnerable to erosion and severely taxed the fertility of what was left, making it ever more challenging for farmers to keep up. In 1981, Montana watched more soil blow away than any other state in the union. To add insult to injury, the very inputs that were causing problems for Conrad’s farms were also causing serious problems for human health and the environment: groundwater pollution, marine dead zones—and alarmingly high rates of cancer. As soil and farm chemicals ran off into the watershed and new superweeds appeared in herbicide-treated fields, Conrad’s neat partition between nature and agriculture was thrown into question. Not even Glacier was immune. Climate change, fueled in no small part by the industrial food system, was melting the national park’s namesake ice shelves, which were forecast to thaw completely as early as 2030.

  For local farmers Orville and Gudrun Oien, Conrad’s problems came as a cruel, almost vindictive surprise. Born and raised on nearby homesteads, just ten days and a mile apart, Orville and Gudrun had spent their entire lives with their hands in north-central Montana earth, mixing their labor, as John Locke would say, with the soil. Since buying their own place in 1939, at the tender age of twenty-seven, the Oiens had scrupulously followed federal farm programs and state extension bulletins. They’d planted recommended varieties of grain. They’d applied recommended chemicals. And to supplement the proceeds from their harvest, the industrious pair had managed a small dairy, supplying the Conrad Creamery with fresh milk. With nothing more than this modest 280-acre homestead and their own hard work, the Oiens had raised four children, sent three of them to college, and nearly paid off the farm note. But now, just as they prepared to pass the place on to their kids, all the rules were changing.

  It was the summer of 1976, and twenty-seven-year-old David Oien was going back to the land. While his shoulder-length hair meandered out the window toward the Rocky Mountains, the grad school dropout imagined growing his own food, making his own energy, and living in sync with nature. He had read enough about change. He wanted to build it.

  Dave’s brown Plymouth Savoy was loaded down with the new ideas he had acquired over the past eight years. There were radical political magazines he’d picked up at the University of Chicago, where he had arrived as a wide-eyed college freshman in 1968. On top of those was a copy of Black Elk Speaks, the teachings of a Lakota holy man, which Dave had taken to heart when he transferred to the University of Montana to study philosophy and religion. And on top of that was Dave’s own vision: the plans he had drawn up for a solar energy collector. Armed with big dreams and some basic carpentry skills, he was ready to transform the world.

  Dave wasn’t just following some abstract notion of “returning to the land.” He was coming home to his family’s 280-acre farm—two and a half miles northwest of the Conrad city limits. Like Dave, Conrad had undergone rapid change during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and it was barreling headlong into a radically new world. But the future for which Conrad was headed wasn’t exactly what Dave and the counterculture had in mind.

  When Dave was young, the Oien place still retained some of the trappings of a small, diversified homestead. Commodity grain had been the main event, to be sure, and yet, chickens and carrots and flowers kept the place feeling like home. But in the years since he’d left, Dave’s father had followed the dictum of Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, planting “fencerow to fencerow.” The Oien place was now one solid stand of malt barley, supported by federal farm programs and controlled with fossil fuel–based chemicals. As Dave tried to envision the place he was returning to, the pile of books in his passenger seat toppled over, depositing Rachel Carson’s shocking exposé about chemical pesticides in his lap. Dave knew his dad was using pesticides. He worried that the pond behind his parents’ house might have become a version of Carson’s Silent Spring.

  Compared to harrowing Christmastime slogs through snow and ice, the summer season drive to Conrad was a breeze. From the university town of Missoula, Dave could get home in a steady four hours, in just three basic steps: east on Montana 200, up and over Rogers Pass, north on I-15.
As the graduate school dropout watched his brief academic life vanish in his rearview mirror, he tried to make sense of his journey. Was he going back or forward?

  In Dave’s experience, there were two options available to Montana farm kids: come back and inherit the home place or leave for a job in a faraway city. Dave had no interest in taking over his dad’s malt barley operation and zero experience with chemical farming. He’d learned nothing about herbicide application or commodity payments, and he didn’t want to.

  So when he’d graduated from high school in 1968, Dave had gone to the University of Chicago. The farm boy’s crash course in urban youth culture had introduced him to a new phrase: “military-industrial complex.” Paging through the alternative magazines that were circulating on campus, Dave had put his disenchantment with Conrad in the context of a larger problem. Corporate control—something his hometown Farmers Union chapter was always up in arms about—seemed to be at the root of both the raging Vietnam War and the new chemical-intensive agribusiness. In both cases, wealthy big shots were profiting from death and destruction. To Dave’s amazement, the kids in Chicago were dreaming up ways to fight this power. They’d even organized a revolutionary movement: the Weather Underground.

  Although Dave had been inspired by his adventure in Chicago, he’d tired of overly cerebral debates and longed to get his hands back in the dirt. For his junior year, he’d transferred to the University of Montana in Missoula, where Rachel Carson and Black Elk had gotten him a little closer to what he was looking for. But Dave was still itching to do something. So when he started graduate school at UM in the fall of 1975, the ecological philosophy student ended up spending most of his time engrossed in the handbook from his night-school class: Scott Sproull’s alternative energy workshop.